I suspect that a 12" Lodge cast iron pan would make short work of the surface finish. Even if the surface can actually handle the abuse, which I doubt, this design is still a bad idea. Risk of burns aside, it violates a fundamental design principle: good design provides affordances.
An affordance is something that tells me that there is a function that can be activated, and it instinctively clues me in as to how something wants to be used. It's a visual and/or tactile indicator. For example, the close widget on a window frame on a computer desktop is an affordance.
A door handle is an affordance. It tells me "this is a door, and it can be opened".
There are good and bad affordances. As an example, a round door knob is a bad affordance. That's because a door knob has several problems:
- It does not intuitively indicate whether it needs to be turned left or right. This is especially a problem for door knobs that are mounted in the center of the door blade. (Yes, there are such doors, which itself is a bad design.)
- A door knob can be pushed or pulled. But there is nothing to tell me on the knob what I should do, push or pull. I have to look elsewhere for a clue, such as the door frame. But that assumes that the door frame will provide the missing information. Lots of doors do not, especially full height glass doors. (How often have you tried to enter the lobby of some large building or otherwise open a large glass door and pushed, only to realise that you should have pulled? Or vice versa? Heck, quite often it is impossible to even tell on which side the bloody thing is hinged on, or whether it slides instead of rotating on a hinge…)
- A door knob is an ergonomic disaster because it usually is impossible to operate with wet hands.
- A door knob requires me to do two things at once to successfully operate the door: I need to both rotate the handle (in the correct direction) and apply force (in the correct direction). There are four possible ways to try and use the handle (turn left and push, turn right and push, turn left and pull, turn left an push). Of the four possibilities, only one leads to success. In other words, this design has a 75% built-in failure rate.
Other types of door handles are still poor affordances, but compensate for this by convention. The stainless steel D-handles that one typically finds on glass doors are an example. The handle can be mounted vertically or horizontally. Neither orientation suggests "pull me" more than it suggests "push me". But, by convention, vertical handles are installed on the pulling side of a door, and horizontal ones on the pushing side of a door. We experience this design as having no friction because we have internalised this rule (even if it was never explicitly stated).
It is instructive to see what happens when someone puts D-handles in the wrong orientation on a door. 95% percent of all people who try to use the door have troubles. And they often don't understand why that was, if you ask them afterwards.
A really good affordance for a door that needs to be pushed is a flat plate. It provides a clear indication as to where I need to apply an action without me having to guess where the hinge side is. And there is no ambiguity as to whether I should pull or push because the only thing I can do with a flat plate is to push it.
The Gaggenau design fails because it has
no affordance at all. It's a cooktop that pretends to be a bench top, thereby misleading the user. Where do I put the pot (assuming I know that I can cook on this bench top)? Who knows, I can't tell, other than by turning one of the knobs and looking for the little dot. (How visible will this dot be if there is bright sunlight coming in through a window?) Assuming I have found the dot, how do I make sure that various pots and pans stay centred on the induction coil underneath? There is nothing to indicate where the perimeter of the heating zone is.
I suspect that there are other things wrong that I haven't thought of yet and would discover only in actual use. One issue with a frameless design such as this (and with inset Ceran cooktops) is that there is nothing to contain a minor spill. Older cooktops usually have a stainless steel frame that is slightly proud of the surface so, if something spills, the spill typically stays on the glass instead of dripping on the floor. Where will a spill go with the Gaggenau design?
None of these insights are new, they have been with us for decades. A seminal book on the topic is
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talks about all sorts of interesting things, from the positioning of light switches on a switch plate to the shape and function of tap handles. It is essential reading for
everyone who designs
anything. Even though the book talks very little about computers, no computer programmer should be allowed to practice his/her craft without having thoroughly internalised the contents.
It appears that the designers at Gaggenau haven't read that book. Or if they did, were overruled by the marketing department.
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